The increasing competition in telecommunication markets has increased the need for competitive performance data that includes market share, subscriber counts, activation metrics and deactivation metrics. Competitive performance data can be used by companies to launch efficient marketing campaigns, to efficiently plan capital investments, or for competitive analysis to name a few. For example data on telecommunication market share (e.g., Cell Phones, Blackberries, and Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)) in a given geographical market can be invaluable to a wireless provider in order to effectively launch marketing campaigns or effectively plan for capital investment to name a few. Similarly, for landline communication companies, knowledge of market-share for a given provider is invaluable.
In other words, data collection can be used by companies to better understand the structure of their respective market and as a result understand their competitive performance. Understanding competitive performance is an integral part of virtually every business structure, enabling businesses to modify their products and services accordingly to achieve their highest possible efficiency, hence making them more competitive given their available resources. Understanding competitive performance is even more important with regards to communication service providers given the increase in number of service providers in recent years for landline and wireless services.
In order to collect data, most communication companies have relied on mostly surveys. Typically a surveyor must place a call and gather data from customers directly. Other methods for gathering data have been online surveys to collect data (e.g., Emailing Surveys or Survey through a website). As a result, most of these methods require subscribers' participation in the process.
Unfortunately this manual process is time consuming, expensive and prone to error. For example, customers are often confused about who their service provider is for a particular communication service and as a result provide the wrong information (e.g., customer may provide the name of long distance carrier as opposed to the local carrier by mistake). Moreover, this approach is prone to non-response from customers (e.g., ten customers may be called but only three may take the survey). This non-response leads to difficulties in making the response data representative on the population being surveyed. In addition, this approach is expensive and requires significant cost to reach sample sizes that provide accurate information. More importantly, the current approach does not allow communication companies to economically determine the number of added subscribers or alternatively the number of lost subscribers.
Other methods to collect data include a dial down technique where a bank of telephone operators dial line ranges assigned to a particular wireless service provider and listen to the connection of the call to determine whether a particular number has been assigned to a subscriber. This method is highlighted and described in more detail in McCulley et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 6,751,295) and hereby incorporated in its entirety by reference. Unfortunately this method is a costly and time consuming process as described in McCulley.
Other methods such as over the air (OTA) technique, described in McCulley, are more accurate and cheaper. OTA technique involves placing specialized receivers throughout a particular market to collect data. However, as discussed by McCulley, the OTA technique does not account for subscribers that use their wireless devices in case of emergency or use their wireless devices for extended periods of time away from their home market.